


death mask at saint helena

by arbitrarily



Category: Utopia (TV 2013)
Genre: Backstory, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, M/M, Rough Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-08
Updated: 2016-04-08
Packaged: 2018-05-31 18:20:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6481714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>She wanted to shape the future; now, she finds herself with a present outside her control.</i>
</p>
<p>1980: Milner and The Assistant in exile. She reclaims what is hers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	death mask at saint helena

**Author's Note:**

> The writing of this was an entire accident and can be blamed on these [screencaps](http://widespindriftgaze.tumblr.com/post/138418902591/guys-i-started-watching-series-4-of-luther-last) from _Luther_. 
> 
> Also!: [a mix](http://8tracks.com/arbitrarym/no-exit)! Because that was another thing I couldn't resist.

 

 

And I kept his love in my palm till it blistered.  
MICHAEL ONDAATJE

 

They ripped everything from you, even your name.  
UTOPIA

 

 

 

 

 

She has been dead over a year when she finds him. He has been dead for even longer. Their deaths, as the saying goes, have been greatly exaggerated. 

It is more difficult, she has learned, to fake a death than to kill. 

She finds him in a cottage, outside Ancroft, on the North Sea. The driver had not lied: the fog is thick, dank, as it rolls in off the water, enveloping her as she looks inland. 

The muck drags at her shoes as she ascends the slope up to the cottage. Nothing around for miles. The car disappears from view behind her. She is alone. He is alone, as directed. A grim smile spreads as she pulls her coat tighter around herself, her hand stiff and alien to her, uncooperative in its grip. Her suitcase batters against her legs.

The wind whips bitter and cold; she can taste the salt, her hair damp as it sticks to her neck, her face. Her shoulder went numb hours ago, the fingers of that same arm cramping and unresponsive. Her mouth is dry and she sweats beneath her heavy coat, the hem salt-stained and ruined. She is sick. She’s had the fever since she left Amsterdam, the gunshot wound as well. Ahead, the outline of a cottage emerges from the fog.

Milner is alone when she finds him and he is alone when he meets her. There is no other telling of this story.

Milner had caught a ride in Ancroft and commanded the man drive her north along the sea. He had commented on the weather – the cold, the fog – as if these were all omens poor enough to give her pause to stay. There’s a pub, he said, but, Drive north, she said. The car crept forward, breaking the cautious hold of his hesitation. Milner was caught off-guard by the overwhelm of her relief: still, despite everything, she would not be denied.

The driver – he had attempted to give her a name, but Milner had replied, “It really is of no concern to me,” and his surprised silence was answer enough – had wanted to take her to a doctor. Instead she made him drive her here, dropped off well away from the cottage. From him. 

Concern had been the driver’s dominant personality flaw. The driver was concerned about her health. Her pale face, the trembling of her fingers. The driver was concern about leaving her here. The blank openness, the waiting sea. It’s not right, was all he said of this concern to her. So she gave him what little money she still had on her and smiled, that same well-worn smile she has worn for so many men like him.

She said, “I’ll be fine.”

She waited and she watched; he stretched his arm across the passenger seat, turned his head from her as he put the car in reverse.

And then she shot him. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Tell me everything you know,” she had said. 

She had not known the man seated across from her, but he had said that he knew him. “Your assistant,” he said, the words barbed, dangerous, she had thought, in their lack of respect. 

“I know a man,” he had said, “who knows where your man is.”

“Bring him to me,” she said.  
  
The bar where she met this other man, her new contact, was in the red light district of Amsterdam. Her jacket was draped over her bad shoulder, her arm tucked against her chest, immobile. A punk band had taken the stage, loud discordant noise that threatened to drown the two of them out. The contact, this man, was skittish, nervous – led her to believe that he had heard of her before, led her to believe that none of it was good. She had become known, she thought, for all the wrong reasons. All of it had gone wrong.

They ran, after. The Three Mile Island Disaster, all the collateral incurred. After Philip disappeared, they too disappeared. They separated. He was exiled first. The government, or the parts of the government that knew of their existence, wanted heads to roll. Milner wanted the power of their myth to persist. So first The Assistant was sent away; so, she fled next. 

“Everything we have ever done was borne from necessity.” It was the last thing she said to him. 

Since, Milner had traveled, attempted to bolster what few old alliances remained, build new ones and guarantee their stake in the future. She discovered it was difficult without him at her side. Left her feeling exposed. 

She decided to seek him out, even before she was shot. 

Milner had been shot not long after arriving in Amsterdam. She spent time recuperating in a safe house there, and then, again, she fled. She used what back channels she still had in her ever-diminishing grasp to find him.

Dark circles stained beneath her eyes, the cold beer she drank gave her clarity, gave her focus, made her forget the pain. Made her disappointment stand out that much starker, her desperation that much more poisonous, as she watched fear and confusion skitter across this man’s face. The man who knew where her man was. 

“I thought you understood,” she said. “What I need from you is a location. I need you to tell me where he is.”

She received a frown in reply. “Who?”

She leaned that much further in, a cobra head before the strike. She frowned, as if this was all so terribly obvious; she could only possibly be searching for one person.

“Mr. Rabbit,” she said. She played into the myth they had created.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A man stands in the doorway to the cottage.

Milner is out of breath from the climb. She sucks in the cold air, feels her lungs ache with it. She can feel damp at her shoulder, the wound reopened. She bats her hair out of her face, unconcerned.

She does not recognize the man in the doorway. She eyes that silhouette in the fog and a cold flutter of fear beats in he. He is truly gone. He has disappeared. Fled, this time from her. He gains clarity, false familiarity, as she closes the distance between them.  [REDACTED] , in the flesh if not as remembered. 

She stops in the middle of the path, crisp tended gardens on either side. He fills the doorway, an arm braced against the doorframe, elbow bent, all of him long and formerly known, now new and lost and terrible. He’s dressed casual, no suit, his face hard lines, unreadable. He’s aged an impossible amount in a single year. 

“So he lives,” she says, a tight-lipped grin spreading her mouth. She sways on her feet. He does not reply.

She completes her approach, stops directly in front of him. She raises her chin to look him in the eye; she grips the handle of her suitcase that much tighter. 

“I left you a body down on the road,” she says.

“How considerate.” His first words to her in over a year. She stares up at him, her eyes too wide, unsure if it’s fear or relief she feels, unsure if he knows to notice.  

He does not move from the door to allow her entry. His sweater looks warm. He looks warm, if not inviting. He remains guarded, a direct contrast to how open she is, how hurt and tired and –

“Can I come in I’ve been shot,” she says, all in one breath, a wry smile and shaky start to a laugh. She thinks she finds herself very funny, that she wants to tell him that even though he never seemed to think so, she really is a very funny woman. Tom thought so. Philip’s dead wife thought so. She can’t remember if Philip did.  

The Assistant does not react to her words save for a very quick flash over his features he just as quickly buries. 

He drops his arm and he takes the suitcase from her without comment. He takes her in, silent all the while. She wonders if solitude has bred this into him – his lack of usual patter, summary of events, unsolicited advice and unbearable questions. 

He takes her in. He peels off her shirt to check her shoulder. She winces when he removes the old stained bandage, the wound underneath seeping and gross, infected, poorly treated back at the safe house in Amsterdam. His hands are warm and capable, her skin clammy. She can smell her own sweat; he doesn’t recoil from her. Even with him this close to her, she feels off-balance. His hand covers her entire shoulder. She can’t remember the last time he touched her.

“Who did this to you?” he asks her, clinical, a hint of curiosity. Cold, she thinks.

“My enemies are legion,” she says, her eyes crinkling as her mouth tips up, not quite a smile. Her grin falters when he does not return it. Her teeth bite into her bottom lip when he presses the pad of his thumb against her wound, a quiet kind of sadism he has never applied to her.  

“That,” he says, “they are.” He presses down harder.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She met him after a botched mission – an alley in Budapest,  [REDACTED] covered in another man’s blood, shiny and brilliant. 

The first time she met him he was not entirely a stranger to her. She had heard of him, always the same hushed, fearful tones surrounding his accomplishments and misdeeds, weight given in equal kind to each. The same reverence was applied to a completed mission as to an unintended body count. It made her curious rather than cautious. 

He was young, tall and skinny. Despite his height, he gave the impression that he could easily disappear. Nondescript and unremarkable, save for all the ways she found him intriguing. His neatly parted hair was mussed, a lock hanging down in his face. He smeared his forehead with blood when he reached to brush it away. The most brutal man she had ever seen, she thought. Her footsteps echoed off the brick walls as she emerged from the shadows. 

The first thing she was met with when she met him was his unquenchable thirst for violence. His face was blank, empty, even when contorted with malice. 

She came closer, studying him.  

He might as well have ripped the man’s throat out with his teeth. The body laid dead at her feet, the man who would become her assistant crouched over him, as if performing last rites all his own.  [REDACTED] looked up at her through his lashes, sticky with blood. 

“What have you done?” she asked, a pleased whisper. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She wakes in a cold sweat, her fever waning. She wakes in his bed, alone. She is wearing the top to a pair of his pajamas, nondescript, over-large on her frame. Flannel, worn and soft. He bought these after he left, she thinks. She fingers the cuff, a loose thread, some fraying.  

He used to dress as immaculately for sleep as he had for any other job: she remembers the expensive looking matched pajamas he would wear, the comfortable slippers, the neatly belted robes. She would come to him in the middle of the night, the early morning before dawn. All that casual intimacy she had taken for granted, arriving at his flat, not having slept the night before. Milner would bring him reports from the lab, reports on Philip, while he told her about the inner workings at Whitehall, the political machinations he was working behind the scenes. The both of them would be disheveled, bright-eyed with exhaustion and believed progress. That one morning, she remembers, her cheeks were flushed pink as she waited at his front door. That sleep-fuzzy look to him when he opened it, hair messy, eyes bloodshot, his pajamas a dark blue, his feet bare. There was an inapplicable monogram sewn into the chest pocket, letters that formed a name not his own. She had tapped the letters once with her fingers, the morning breaking behind her London grey and grim.

“Who’s this?” she had asked him. His eyes locked with hers. 

“Me, of course,” he had said.

Milner cocked her head, looked up at him. Her mouth was sly and slick as she said, “That makes you a stranger then.”

She wakes alone. In his bed. In his clothes. He is all around her but he’s never seemed more remote and unknowable to her. She sits up in his bed and she listens – there is no one here but her. Her mouth is dry; she drags herself out of the bed. Wonders, when her feet hit the cold floor, where he had slept. 

Her legs are weak, threaten to buckle under her weight. She makes it to the kitchen, her arm tucked to her side like a clipped wing. She fills a glass with water and drinks it eagerly, water spilling down her chin, onto his pajamas. She peers out the window over the sink, is met with more grey. She can’t tell if it’s morning or afternoon. No one is out there. There’s no one out there. She is alone. She returns to his bed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In her dreams she is seated at the head of a long table. At the other end of the table sits Philip. In her dreams she speaks to him. Even here, he has nothing to say to her in reply. Not anymore. But these are her dreams and in them, she speaks to him. There is no food ever set on the table. Instead it is bare, a gleaming black onyx that stretches on for what appears to be no end. But there is an end and at the end is Philip. She calls to him, demands his attention. She speaks to him but she does not say she’s sorry. He says nothing to her.

In her dreams there is a man standing behind her chair. She cannot turn her head to see him, but she knows. He’s there. He’s always there. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Milner wakes, this time not alone. 

She blinks, rolls away from the wall with a groan. She stills when she finds him watching her. The Assistant is seated in a wooden chair at the kitchen table, facing her. It’s still night, the world outside the windows dark, the lone source of light in the cottage the lantern he has lit at the table. The cottage is small – there isn’t much distance between them; he could be at her and on her in five paces. She eyes him warily; he braces his elbows on his knees and hunches forward but he does not speak.

She struggles to sit up in the bed, eyes never leaving him. “I must confess,” she says, “I thought you’d be happier to see me.” He says nothing at first. She watches him watching her. He leans into the light from the lantern and Milner is afforded her first good look at him.  

The small cottage does not suit him. Or, it didn’t suit him, the man that Milner remembers him as. Solitude has changed him. A rough beard has grown in, there’s a sturdier build to him (as if, she thinks, he has learned to stand on his own without her; as if, without her, he is that much larger, that much bigger than her), his eyes colder. From what little he has said to her, she can tell he has lost that posh edge to his voice he had adopted after meeting her. The accent was never his, nor were the names he wore, and it makes sense for him to have abandoned it here. Less conspicuous. If she wasn’t so unsettled by how he has changed she thinks she might feel something akin to pride.

She drags her fingers through her own matted hair, draws her knees up to her chest under the blanket. 

“Who told you where to find me?” he asks.

“Don’t worry,” she says, a wave of her hand. She meets his eye. “He’s been taken care of. All witnesses accounted for.” 

She watches him rub at his jaw, the tic of muscle under his hand as he grinds his teeth. He looks down and he shakes his head. “Jesus Christ, Milner.” She bites into her bottom lip, a smirk. There’s quite the trail of bodies leading to his front door. She thinks he should be flattered; she knows better than to say so. 

He raises his head. 

“You know, for a moment there, when I first saw you, I thought perhaps you’d come to apologize.”

“Apologize.” Her throat rasps, her voice serrated, her curiosity rendered harsh and judging. She wonders what her voice sounds like to him, if it’s familiarity scrapes over him the same as his does to her.

“How silly of me, I know. I had thought it even then – Milner,” her name said deliberate and barbed, “would never say a thing like that. She would never say she was sorry. Milner wouldn’t even recognize the impulse.” He pauses. “But I thought maybe I didn’t know you at all. I thought, maybe, I was owed something.” 

A sneer blooms on her mouth, cruelty threatening, but he beats her to it.  
  
“I should make you crawl to me.” The words are said flat and casual, inconsequential. Distant, except for the look to him, the tightness with which he holds himself: she recognizes that impulse in him. It’s restraint. His eyes are dark, hot, as he stares at her. She’s afraid to admit it to herself, to him. She does not move a muscle on the bed, meets his gaze with her own strength. But the truth of it is – she’s unsettled, deeply, the open hostility from him unexpected, The Assistant – _her_ Assistant – not as she remembers him. She is afraid. Not of what he might to do her, but of what she might have finally done: she has found a way to lose his loyalty to her.

“I’d rather you didn’t,” she says after a long pause. She feels her mouth tilt up, she can’t help herself when she adds: “Though Christ knows how fucking long you’ve wanted me on my hands and knees.”

He stands. “You always did give yourself too much credit,” he says, light and unaffected. “The bathroom is through there.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is no bedroom in the cottage. Cottage, she thinks, is a fairly generous term for what is little more than an over-large bedsit. The kitchen is a deep stained porcelain sink beneath a window that overlooks a gravel path down to the water; a small ice chest with a door that sticks; two burners that require a match to light; a pocked and nicked old oak table she imagines the entire cottage must have been built around, too bulky and large to fit through the narrow door. There is a wood-burning stove in the corner of the room, which serves double as their sole source of heat. His pantry consists of a shelf of canned sardines and pickled onions, a fresh loaf of bread he gets from town, three bottles of Irish whisky he collects from the same. There is a sagging plaid sofa and an old rocking chair that creaks under her weight. The curtains over the window are a faded red gingham and the mat at the door says  WELCOME and the bed is tucked into the opposite corner of the room from the stove. There is a small radio and a collection of old weather-warped newspapers, and a Bible with random words neatly excised and cut out of the text. She spends a solid afternoon flipping through the carbon paper-thin pages, reverent solely out of intrigue (never religion), imagining the ransom notes such cut and pasted words like _righteous_ and _throne_ and the entire passage _It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of a living God_ could build. She surprises herself with how much she remembers, able to quote entire passages from memory, and disappoints herself that history is still so intractably attached to her. 

She drops the Bible on the marked kitchen table one evening. He is deboning a fish in the basin of the sink; she can hear the scrape of the knife as it works. His shoulders tense at the sound of her, the Bible, and then he resumes his work.

She rifles through the thin pages, no longer careful, deliberate in her attempt to make noise. “Someone’s committed quite the act of blasphemous vandalism.”

She’s met with the wry twist of his mouth, hardly a smile, as he glances over his shoulder at her. “I had noticed.” He reverts his attention back down – the knife, the blood, his hands, the dead fish.

She collapses – dramatically, albeit unseen – into a chair at the table. 

“There’s nothing to do here,” Milner says. She looks around the small room, her voice a toxic cocktail of mockery and barely concealed curiosity. She looks to him. “How on earth do you pass the time?” 

His body stills again. This time, his posture straightens. The knife is still in his hand as he turns to face her. He returns her gaze, flat, assessing, but not reflecting. He does not say a word.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He told her a story about Guangdong once, a smaller scale though no less brutal version of the story the two of them would market as belonging to another man:

Mr. Rabbit. 

The story wasn’t about him, but about a former handler of his. In the story, he had made too many enemies in pursuit of his own gain and he was caught out. He played everyone off each other and in the end, the enemy of his enemy became friends, good enough friends to work together. To ensure his capture. To kill him and carve the Chinese character for rabbit into his chest, a macabre warning that was never received by anyone who might need it.  

“It’s a good story,” Milner said. The small smile on his face said that he agreed. So they took it – the name, the story – and made it their own.

Mr. Rabbit. All she ever had to do was say that name and watch fear brighten their eyes, inner circuitry alit with danger. 

She used to think he reflected her. Never a sycophant – too smart, too sharp and independent for that – but she thought she could see herself in him. That it had made sense, then, for the two of them to be called the same. Mr. Rabbit. She knows what history will say if Philip Carvel has his way: she is Mr. Rabbit. She created Mr. Rabbit. Milner and her assistant created Mr. Rabbit. It will be a lie.

Philip Carvel is responsible for Mr. Rabbit. 

They only invented him because they needed a story. They needed a name. He’s responsible for all of this. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She was in the lab with Philip. It was late, empty takeaway containers littered at her elbow, Philip’s notes open before them both, ignored. “You’re not a scientist,”  [REDACTED] had said to her once. “I don’t know why you humor him as if you understand.”

She had pouted and he had scowled. “Please don't tell me you’re jealous. Wouldn’t that just be terribly pedestrian.”

He had said nothing, and she had chosen to believe that meant she had the final word.

In the lab, she told Philip that she had to go; “he’ll be waiting for me,” she said.  
  
“Tom?” Philip asked.

A surprised laugh escaped her. “My assistant,” she said. She watched Philip’s face, watched, and it was as if he was working out a formula with an end result he could not understand how he had arrived at.

“Does he have a name?” he asked. Milner stilled, only one sleeve of her coat pulled on and over her arm. It was the cautious way he asked the question that gave her pause. 

She shrugged, she said it didn’t matter, slipped her arm into the other sleeve, thought nothing of it until she saw the way Philip was looking at her. She felt exposed, as if she had cross-contaminated two variables meant to remain separate. 

Philip asked her, “What do you call him then?”

“I don’t,” she lied. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He has a name now. It’s temporary, as most things in exile are. 

She tests it on her tongue, first in private, the low pressure spray of the shower in the small bathroom filling her mouth as she tries the syllables, gargling water that tastes of rust and him, his name. She traces the letters along the underside of the kitchen table while he prepares dinner in the growing gloom, as if she is casting a hex against him or rather to protect herself from him. 

She uses it on him, aiming to wound. 

She calls it to him from across the room, his pajama shirt loose around her as she climbs into the bed. She watches him carefully, out of the corner of her eye – the relaxed, almost arrogant posture of his body as he reaches for the lamp. She’s disappointed: he does not react. He blinks at her, no evidence of bruised pride, no evidence that she has touched him at all.

She has missed her mark. They have been apart too long, she thinks. She used to be a better shot. She never used to worry about a wide margin of error with him. 

“Yes?” he asks her.

She fingers the puckered scar at her shoulder as she watches him across the cottage, measures the distance between them with contempt. She watches him. She wants to say to him –

“Nothing,” she says, and he turns out the light.

Before, she still called him by his given name.  [REDACTED], always said as a concession or a barb, a simple gesture of misunderstood emotion.

It’s not his name either, but it is the one he has carried the longest. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All of  [REDACTED]’ s background reads like a Dickensian lie. The orphan boy, the Church, his bruised fists and dirty knees and tight-lipped mouth. The child without a name. He had been born poor, no name when taken in at the seminary. He was raised with those God-fearing boys, a void for the devout inside of him. He had the loyalty but not the cause.

Enter Milner.

Only he knows of her past. The both of them were raised as orphans. They share not only a self-sufficiency but an even greater understanding – they can stand on their own feet, but they crave someone, something, to belong to.

Despite that, she has lived a life against the world, considered allies as future weaknesses to bear first and then cut. Drop. It’s an ugly world – she’s never understood those who cherish it, all maudlin cheer and feigned altruism. 

They were going to change all that. They still will. 

She misses, in a way, those early days. When she met him his name was Daniel. That’s what they had called him at the seminary and the name he kept when British Intelligence picked him up. “A smart and malleable boy,” they had called him. He had a record – all myriad forms of petty violence, as if blood called to him. As if there was an anger inside him that only knew of release through his hands and the damage they could bring. She understood that, and because she understood the restless brutality of his hands, she thought she knew him too. He was tall and pale and blond with big blue eyes. He was beautiful. A smart and malleable boy. 

He had no history beyond the seminary. He did not know who his parents had been, where he came from. His past a blank slate. She envied that – she wanted to have come from nowhere. She wanted to be free from history.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Milner dreams of where she came from.

She has never learned not to dream this: a roof on fire and a woman crying and blood caked on the side of her neck. The woman is her mother, or in her dreams that is who she knows her as – her mother. Her hair is red too and Milner does not if this is the truth or if she has designed her mother to match her surroundings: red. Red with blood spilled across the snow, red as the flag that waves resolutely overhead, red as the soldiers who come. Hands grab at her, there is an escape in the night, the woman with red hair is dead or she is dying and she is always screaming. She had asked Philip if he had ever been here, that night they met, the night she thought she might jump if only to show him; she had asked him, “Have you ever been – ”

In her dreams, he took her in. Not Philip and not Tom, but him. 

“You want to know a secret?” she asked of him. She traced lines that made a family tree into the unhealed lines of his scar, the tips of her fingers tacky with his blood. His skin was cold, his breath hot at her ear. “I came from a small village outside – ” He put a hand over her mouth. “Shh,” he said, and then he slit her throat. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Milner is in the kitchen, alone. It is her turn to prepare dinner. She is not a good cook. She eyes the knife in her hand, raises her head and locates him outside. She grips the knife tighter.

She is not used to distrust between them. 

Living with him is like a game played with ever-evolving rules. A bit like a prison where they both serve as each other’s wardens. He doesn’t speak to her much, but she still talks to him, asks him questions he doesn’t always answer. 

“Who do they think you are?” she asks him after one of his supply runs into town.

“They don’t care who I am,” he says. He says it like an accusation, but she can’t find the thread to string the blame back to her.

Despite the tension, there is a naturalness to the two of them sharing the same space, the familiarity of him this close to her. It disturbs her that he feels foreign to her now, that he seems to want nothing to do with her. He is not quite a stranger, but it is as if in her absence he ceased to belong to her. 

Despite that, despite all the time they have spent together, they have never had this degree of intimacy. 

They share the bed.  

They sleep in the same bed, each on their own side. He’s so much bigger than her, takes up more space, impossible to ignore beside her. In the gloom of early morning, Milner lays in the bed, on her back. Her shoulder still bothers her, she’s most comfortable on her side, on her good shoulder, but then she would be facing him.

She can see his profile on the pillow beside her, feel the heavy drag of his breath in and out, can smell him. She knows it, that she had taken it for granted, knowing him. It’s cold in the cottage at night; she has to fight the impulse to press her body against his, seek out his heat. 

They don’t talk much, but when they do it always winds up being about one subject: Philip Carvel. The dark kitchen, the uncorked bottle of wine only she drinks from. 

“He was weak,” he says, of Philip. He doesn’t use his name. He doesn’t need to.

“Don’t,” she says, her mouth tannin-thick but still sharp, her lit cigarette abandoned. “He was supposed to choose me. He was supposed to choose us.”

There’s cruelty in the way he assesses her, as if he has found a weakness he always suspected to be there and she only just now exposed it to him. She wants to tell him he has no idea. She wants to tell him she has learned the meaning of weakness in this past year. She has learned the toll of loss, of what it feels like to truly stand alone and diminished. She has learned. _It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of a living God,_ she would say, and perhaps he would say: I know, I was the one to cut and keep the words. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Every day in exile is the same. Every day, the dirty dishes in the sink, the window above the sink dirty, the water pressure low, every day the faucet drips. Every morning cold, her nose red with it, fingers stiff, a tremble that settles into her bones until she’s warmed up by the small stove. The collar of the sweater he wears is stretched, leaves his throat bare, and every day her eyes find that exposed expanse of skin, the dip and the hollow valley, topography created by bone and muscle, mapped in skin. Every day she wakes with a hungry mouth. Each day a vampire, sucking her dry. She tells herself she is doing time, though she remains unsure as to the crime committed. This is not her plea for guilt or innocence, but rather for specificity. Which crime and which time. It was worth it, she would say. All of it. She wouldn’t change a thing. Every day she mounts her defense under the spitting spray of the shower, surrounded by rust and mildew. Every day she says to herself: it was worth it. It will be worth it. Exile is not an ending but a respite. Every day she means to mount her defense against him; she means to tell him it was all worth it. They eat fish from cans, his hands look old, in the mirror’s reflection her neck looks old, they are time-tested, every day in exile is a test of time.

Seated at his kitchen table, she comes to a decision: they will return to London when she has regained his trust.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She dreams of knifing him open, finding each and every thing she ever buried inside of him, and setting them all free. She cuts along the lines he made and in her dreams he laughs at her until he can’t. 

He has to pay, she has to make him pay, has to ignore him when he finally asks her, “What have I done?” What did he do to deserve this? Everything. The knife cuts in deep and he gasps high and tight and as his flesh parts to her will, her edict. Her blade. 

“It hurts, it hurts,” he pants, but his hips shift under her and the blade cuts deeper. The blade cuts until the hilt of the knife is out of her hands, until it’s him, cutting into her. The first mark of his knife against her flesh makes her moan and he smiles down at her. “It has to match,” he tells her as he begins to cut.

_What have I done?_ She knew better than to ask.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She had wanted him to see her with Tom. 

They had been married for three months. She felt like she had something to prove – not to her husband, but to him.

She knew to expect him at the house – it had been him who set the meeting and her who set the time, the place – so Milner had eyed the clock as she crawled into Tom’s lap. They were in the dining room, at the top of the stairs. He stunk of gin so she did not kiss him; she turned her back to him and his juniper mouth as she rode him. She faced front, blocked Tom’s view, offered and presented herself to  [REDACTED] when he entered – her bare breasts, bared cunt, Tom’s cock spreading her open. 

She moaned, purposeful, unsure of the line between theatrical and genuine, when she heard the front door open. Tom did not notice. 

She watched his entrance. She only saw his feet first, each slow deliberate step bringing him closer to her. He had to know, she thought; she bit down, hard, on her bottom lip. And then –  [REDACTED] stood there, at the base of the small flight of stairs, staring at her, reproachful in his silence. She met his eye and her breath caught, her mouth opened, no sound escaped. 

He exited as quickly as he entered. Her hips stilled when his feet disappeared from view, when she heard the latch of the front door click. No one else had taught her to be ashamed of her own pettiness. She batted Tom’s hands away, and he obliged. 

Milner found him out front, smoking a cigarette by their front door. 

“Are you quite finished?” he asked but he would not look at her.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He had always made for a better honeypot than she did. Women and men. 

He didn’t so much excel at seduction as he did at offering himself. He’d lure them out, be it with his hands, his mouth, his cock, romance as violent as any threat from him.  

Milner would listen in on the radio while he fucked or he was fucked. The noises he would make always sounded real, and she was unsure whether to feel impressed or disgusted. The noises – the slap of flesh on flesh, the small sounds of encouragement he made, the drawn-open, dragged-out moans that made her wonder what act could inspire such a sound (or its performance). She wondered if that meant he really liked this, fucking and being fucked, the subterfuge of it, using his body to use someone else. She wondered if he simply liked for his body to be needed. 

Another time she watched as he sucked a man off. He wasn’t the first – there were plenty of men with plenty of titles, plenty of reasons for his mouth around a cock. This time it was a Swiss national affiliated with The World Bank. His future use was obvious. He liked to be watched, so they indulged him –  [REDACTED] on the bed with him, Milner seated in the armchair by the window, a hotel room in Paris, as romantic as any recruitment op could go. She watched him, the pliant way he let hands roam over him, his mouth at this man’s command. He didn’t look at her once, and she watched him open his mouth and swallow him down, unclear if he enjoyed any of this or if there was only the heavy sense of duty. She realized then that he would let anyone do anything to his body. She felt something twist inside of her, unkind and unforgiving. She decided she would make him hers. 

After, walking the Paris streets to their own far less expensive hotel, she had looked up at him in the dim streetlight.

“Did you enjoy that?” 

There was that flat look from him, but surprise in it as well, his eyes big and blue. “It’s my job,” he said.

She reached up to him, swiped her them along his swollen bottom lip. She pictured the cock that had been in his mouth, pushed her thumb in that much further and he let her. 

“You’re a whore,” she said, equally accusatory and in awe. 

He bit down on the pad of her thumb, hard, his eyes bright – unkind and unforgiving. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She spots a stranger down on the road, out past the gate, one morning. Milner is alone, wandering the small garden path, a cup of tea, as close to domestication as any man has achieved with her, when she spies the stranger. The stranger does not look up at the cottage nor at her but she watches him, her eyes following him until he shrinks down to nothing. 

She watches, even after he’s gone. She wants to be certain.

He’s the first man she has seen in over a month who is not  [REDACTED] .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I thought there were some issues we could discuss,” Milner says. "Pertaining to our return." She says it like they are in a cabinet meeting, a briefing, anywhere but here.  

“I’m not interested.” He gets up from the table.

Milner rolls her eyes, lets her shoulders slouch. There is a way to get out of all this. He has to know that. All they need is a plan.

They have been here together for three months.

She has never been a woman known for her patience. What little she has, he has exhausted. They do nothing here, in this small cottage, in the middle of nowhere, on the edge of the sea, and yet she is exhausted. She cannot understand his anger – she cannot understand him. That he does not see how much work there is for them to do, that they don’t have time for his petulance. They need a plan to return, they need a plan to reassert their power. She glares at his back. He’s standing right there yet she has never felt more alone. 

She shifts her gaze to around the room. The weather-warped stack of books, the pages yellowed and curling. The spreading water damage on the ceiling, like a spreading disease. She looks to the drop-off into the sea out the window. She looks back to him, how well he has made himself fit here, his existence as unreal and forgotten as everything else about this place.

“Your misery here, it fascinates,” she says, a careful drawl. “Despite all that, you’ve made yourself quite at home,” she says. Snideness infects her voice. 

He remains silent. 

“Still no word of Carvel?” she says. She presses her hands flat against the table. He glances back at her, disinterest obvious in the lines of his face. “No word of Jessica either?” He says nothing. It chills the frustration in her into something dangerous, something she wants to wield against him.

“You’re too personally invested,” he says, no inflection to his voice. Finally – a reply. 

“In my work?” She rises from the table, steps over towards him. “My work is my life. You know that.” He turns around to face her, his hands braced on the lip of the sink behind him. He blocks out the light from the window behind him.

“In Philip Carvel.”

She stills in front of him. She bites the inside of her cheek but meets his eyes. 

“I should’ve,” he pauses. “When I saw what was happening, I should have intervened. I know that now.”  
  
“You’re so proud of your foresight when perhaps you should be ashamed of your ineffectiveness,” she bites off. They’ve switched roles, she thinks, the thought dim, drowned out by her cresting anger. She used to be the diplomatic one, and he the sword. “You should’ve thought for yourself, is that what you mean? When the fuck have you ever done that.”  
  
“Been doing a lot of that this past year, Milner. I find I rather like it.” The even timbre of his voice rumbles from his chest, she can practically feel it as much as hear it. It’s the most he’s said to her in days, but it hardly feels a victory now.

Fury chokes her. Because she knows. She knows what he’s saying – he doesn’t need her. He doesn’t need her, but she still –

“So, you would have killed him. And what of Janus?” She crosses her arms over her chest, embracing herself tightly. 

“We should have had another plan in place.” Her anger has not reached, has not infected him: his voice remains even and calm, rational, as he speaks.

“You think I don’t know that?” 

“I’m not entirely clear on what it is you do and do not know, Milner.”

“Stop saying that,” she snaps without thinking.  
  
She watches it dawn on him, like he’s found another card he forgot he hid up his sleeve. “Milner?” he asks, quiet and devastatingly effective.

She takes a step forward. That name has always been wrong in his mouth. He says it the same way arsenic would sit on his tongue: fatal and unwanted. 

“And who the fuck are you?” she hisses, stepping closer. “ [REDACTED] or Daniel or Adam or Gregory? Did you know? MI-6 refers to you as “The Assistant” in their files. They don’t even give you a name. They don’t care. You’re no one. You’ve never been anyone.”

He doesn’t react; she can’t stop her jaw from trembling. 

“And yet,” he finally says, “here you are.” Her mouth twists with confusion and he almost smiles. “Alone, with me. Again.” 

He leans in to her, steps closer when she takes a step back. She stumbles into the table, the edge of it bruising, poking into her thigh, and he’s there, in front of her. He’s trapped her; her heart hammers.  

“I may be no one,” he says, “but I am all you have.” 

She twists away from him, off-balance as she knocks into the leg of the table. “You’re no one,” she repeats, but her voice is shaky, unsure of herself and when anger had bled out into fear inside of her.

The movement from him is sudden and no less violent for its gentleness: he grabs her by the jaw, his fingers curling into her hair, and he tips her face up this his. She fights to keep her face defiantly blank; she fails, recognizes it in his face, the searching gaze, the bitterly confident pull of his mouth.

“Don’t you pretend to know me now,” he says. He pulls back from her, but not before appraising her. He looks her up and down and Milner can’t help but feel she has been found wanting. 

She listens to him leave, the rattling slam of the front door of the cottage. She places a steadying hand on the table and takes a deep breath.

She had banged her knee, cracked it against the leg of the table. She winces as she dabs at the smeared blood. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She knows him. He’s a liar. She knows that. She knows him as well as she knows herself, a certainty she has trusted from the jump. 

She knows what his anger looks like, how it spills out from him in red. She remembers the early days, when it took so little to set him off, when there was rarely a problem he didn’t think his own curled fists, his drawn weapon, could solve. So many meets went bad because of him, so many messes to clean up, but the outcome was always what the brass wanted. He has much to learn, that was what their handler had said, but she had also seen the gleam of interest in that man’s eye as he had looked upon Gregory, for that was his name then. She has known him for many years and with those years, many names. 

Cultivated violence, their handler had said, is one goal achieved. The young man, it would read in his file, shows great promise. 

Milner had recounted this to their section chief. “He kills without compunction,” she had said. 

“Say it with a little less pride,” he said.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The next morning, they both wake before the sun.  

He is quiet beside her, flat on his back, early morning gloom rendering them dark and blue, as if underwater, but she knows he is awake. She knows he’s awake and she knows he knows she’s awake. Isn’t that how it’s always been between the two of them?: aware of each other, aware of the other’s awareness, and waiting each other out. His hand is beside hers on the mattress but she does not touch him. 

“There aren’t many people to talk to, out in the world,” she hears herself say. Her voice is gentle, as tentative as she has ever let herself sound. She pauses; she can hear his breathing, the slow rasp of in and out, can feel him beside her. “There’s no one, in fact.” 

Another pause spreads and he does not fill. She turns her head to look at him, her red hair spread out across the pillow, dark as an oil slick in the lack of light. The sheets are floral and threadbare and not for the first time she wonders at the cottage’s original occupants.

He doesn’t look at her, but she can see the glassy shine of his open eyes, the dip of his parted mouth. 

“You shouldn’t have come here.” He says it quietly, each word measured, as if he has had them prepared but lacked the follow-through to use them. Until now. 

She can feel it, how her temper doesn’t so much flare but curdle, sour, within her. Where else was she supposed to go? She can’t ask him. Too many things have happened to them, separate and together, and they have reached the point where she must hide things from him. He has brought them here – he has brought her here.

She rolls to face him, the soft mattress dipping under them. 

“Let me see,” she says. She can only mean one thing; they both know this. 

He offers just enough hesitation to make her have to say it again: “Let me see.”

And just has history would predict: he obeys her. He removes his shirt and she stares at him, watches him lay back down, his skin pale but more muscular, more developed than she remembers. Perhaps more than the bureaucratic days required. As if she had made him soft and without her, this is what he has become – his own man. 

She reaches and she touches him. Her fingers barely brush against the reddened and raised lines on his flesh. She wonders how much he hates her. She traces the lines of the scar lightly with her fingers. Over and over again, increasing pressure until he finally shifts under her, the sheets rustling against him, his breath coming faster. He won’t look at her – he keeps his gaze fixed up on the ceiling or he squeezes his eyes shut shut. So she scrapes him with her nails, earns another loud breath from him, the minute movement of his hips. So they’re here, she thinks, trust destroyed, where each and every thing he gives her must be earned by her first. 

She uses her mouth then, her tongue, to trace the scar. Mr. Rabbit. He tastes warm, an animal after the trap. He releases a shaky breath, his abdomen rising and falling under her. She can feel him hard against her chest when she leans into him, biting and sucking at the marked skin. She can see his hands curling into fists in the sheets, strength coiled in his arms as he holds himself away from her. She wants him to touch her. She wants him to know.

She looks up at him through her lashes, a string of spit connecting her mouth to the red lines, her hair spread across he match. He is watching her now, his eyes hooded and dark, his bottom lip bitten. She shouldn’t have come here, she thinks, dark and mocking – who else knows him like this?

“Let me see,” she says again, her voice lower, threatening to crack. He sucks in a sharp breath but does not look away from her, tension obvious along his shoulders, his neck, still keeping himself in check. She’s always admired that about him: his self-taught level of control. 

He grunts as he lifts his hips and her fingers curl under the waistband. She can feel her pulse thrumming in her neck; impossible, she thinks, the ridge of her knuckles dragging down his thighs along with his pants, that they've never had each other like this.  

His cock is swollen, leaking already. She grabs him loosely by the wrist. “I’m not going to do everything for you,” she says, guiding his hand to his cock. He doesn’t require further instruction.  

She wraps her body around his, her fingers low on his hip, scraping at the outer reaches of the scar while her mouth bites and sucks at the top, at the center of his chest. He’s forceful, merciless, with himself, the rapid movement of his wrist making his body shake under her, hers trembling in reply. 

She hisses when he knots his free hand in her hair, pulling hard, and it hurts, it feels good. She digs her nails into him, her mouth open against him as she spreads her legs, settles herself against his thigh. He comes on his stomach, the scar, and with the flat of her tongue, across his flesh, she licks. It makes sense for her to know him like this. He’s silent save for the bit-off caught-out gasp that fills the small cottage. 

He tries to catch his breath, his chest rattling with it, his face unreadable when he looks down at her. He takes his own fingers and smoothes them through the mess. His fingers bump against her parted lips, and she opens, lets him feed his fingers into her mouth. She sucks his fingers like she could have sucked his cock. He watches her carefully the entire time. A dull ache throbs between her legs; she wants to tell him to do something about it, finds herself silent, the taste of him flat on her tongue, unable to demand from him what she wants. It seems as if he is waiting for her to make her demands. When that doesn’t come –

He gets up out of bed, leaves her, and he pads naked across the room. She watches him put distance back between them. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She knows him. She knows that he loves her. He came to her wedding to Tom. He found her alone before the ceremony (as it were, a local vicar and Tom’s parents and him, who she had introduced as her business partner, Adam).  

“I trust you know what you are doing,” he had said. He looked at her like it cost him a great effort, and Milner, dressed false in all white, had felt a twist of pride.  
  
“I love him,” she said to wound him.

He was a liar, he was invincible, her blows never did appear to land. The only time she ever saw him bleed was at the hands of another, and then his own. 

“I trust you know what you are doing,” he said again, only this time it sounded less like a question and more like a declaration. He was a liar.

He was there the night she murdered Tom. He was right, she had wanted to say, to trust her.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She gets out of the bed and follows him into the kitchen. The faucet is running and he turns it off. Turns to face her. 

He’s still naked, the scar etched into him, healed but hideous, and she looks at him, thinks of him as something awful she created. She thinks –

“I’ve never been a stranger to you,” she says, and another name for this she knows would be begging. “Don’t you dare start pretending now.”

He doesn’t move. The stillness of his body has always fascinated her. He’s like the coiled mechanism inside a gun: the hammer, the spring, the bullet loaded in the chamber. Her, the trigger. Her, saying _fire_. His body remains still and unmoving.

“You know me, and I know you,” she says, her confidence waning, making her that much more transparent. That’s when he strikes.

He grabs her by the face, again, as he had done the day before. This time he kisses her. His mouth on her mouth stuns her, her arms hanging limp at her sides. 

His mouth is brutal on hers, almost as if he is trying to make her pay for everything she has cost him. Everything she took from him. She braces herself against his chest, opens her mouth, and she pays and she takes, and she drags her tongue messily and wet against his.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She knows him. He loves her. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He pushes her onto the bed, on her hands and knees. She can hear her own slick when he slides two fingers between her legs, not enough of what she wants. She gasps all the same. 

“Did Carvel ever fuck you?” he asks, too dark to be as casual as she knows he desires. She glares, hangs her head and refuses to answer. He refuses to put his fingers in her and her hips roll, impatient. 

“But you wanted him to,” he says, mocking, but no – he’s too serious, too cruel for mockery alone. 

“You wanted him inside you.” He pushes his fingers in deep and her back bows. 

She bites her tongue hard enough to taste blood when he fucks into her, thick and unforgiving. It hurts, but she pushes back onto him, her eyes watering. He’s mumbling something low and threatening – something about filling every part of her, and her mouth opens immediately and she moans, please. She thinks it’s what she’s wanted from him this entire time – wanted to tell him, _they put a hole in me and I need you to fill it_.

He can’t know how she needed him, how lost she was, even to herself, without him. Is that what he wants though? To know? They shot her. She had walked right into a trap. She was wild and half-cocked without him, she needed him there as her level of caution. Does he want to know how she fled Amsterdam? About the two men she killed for information, how at no point did she doubt it was worth it. Does he want to know about the safe house, the dirty bandage wrapped around her shoulder, no on there to tell her what was best for her, no one there to tell her what to do, no one there –

She buries her face into the sheets, unable to fully muffle the high sobbing sounds escaping from her mouth.

She knows him. And he knows her.

He flips her onto her back suddenly. He slips his cock back into her, his tongue in her mouth. She wraps her leg around him, her body bent in half for him – and is this what it’s like for him? what it’s been like? his body cracked in half, broken open for her use.

Milner clings to him, her hips rolling as she snarls – “There is nothing I would not have done,” and then she stops, unable to continue. 

“I know,” he tells her, but he says it resigned, and she wants to shove him away, pull him in close, punish him for not understanding her, not understanding this, the one thing she needs for him to know. 

“No,” she says, “You don’t.” 

It’s not like what she witnessed of him before, with all those other people. There’s nothing performative or perfunctory in this. He’s mostly quiet when he fucks her. She looks up at him, his mouth near her temple, her hair caught against his wet mouth as he pulls away from her, a dazed look on his face, the sun rising in the kitchen window, and he’s beautiful to her again. She raises her mouth to his mouth, sinister and certain as she says, “There is nothing I would not have done to return to you.” She can’t look at him so she hides her face in his skin, against the column of his throat, his collarbone, her face pressed in the center of his chest, she can feel the thrum and the beat of him, can pretend she is inside that same mechanism, inside of him, responsible for the blood that pumps, wanting to – needing to – own him, to reassert that sense of control over her own heart. 

He makes a broken, open noise that sounds a lot like her name. It sounds a lot like _Letan_.

She comes hard, her body clenching around him, holding him inside her. She can feel the lines of the scar against her skin. She does not say a name. Instead, he takes the words out of her mouth. He says: mine. 

They return to London a week later.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Milner dreams of –

The girl. Jessica. She’s crying, or Milner can hear crying, but the girl’s mouth is closed in a tight line and her eyes are clear and dry. She looks up at Milner with reproach. In her dreams the girl does exactly what she had done to their lives: she ruins them. They’re in a hospital waiting room and the girl is holding her father’s hand. Philip. He is here and he is alive, he is close enough to touch. In her dreams Milner reaches for the two of them. She tries to bargain with them. She tells the girl that she was there, the day she was born, she was there from the start, she is the closest thing to a mother that girl should ever know, and even in her dreams, Milner’s arguments fizzle out with rage: that child should not exist, they would not be here had it not been for her, for Philip’s _attachments_. “For your own,” a man’s voice says. In her dreams they deny her, and she is left to wait, the floor sticky with old blood and refuse. The door is open but it is always out of reach. She sits still; she waits.   

Milner dreams –

A gun going off in her hand, the surprise of the kickback, the soreness to her shoulder the following day, the perfect aim of the shot despite her fear, the sunburst of blood and shattered skull left behind. An empty lab in an empty city in an empty country; she has won, and they all are dead, all are dead, save for her. A child growing inside of her – she can feel it, scratching at her from the inside, tiny fingernails razor sharp.

She dreams of a woman crying, her neck bloody. She is speaking to her. This is what she imagines her mother is telling her: everything you have done will stay inside of you. Everything you have ever done you will have to pay for. There will come an accounting and you will be found wanting. Everything you have ever done – her mother would have said but in her dreams her mother does not have a mouth and there are flies circling her eyes and her eyes cannot see and asleep or awake Milner will not know if this is a dream or if this is a memory. She will not know if there is a difference. 

She dreams of him. He’s waiting for her on the other side of the door. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

They separated not long after they returned from the Three Mile Island Station. 

“You’re sending me away,” he said, the implications of what she was saying dawning on him. She made herself look at him – the look of betrayal on his face he did nothing to hide, edged with that same impatience he had harbored against her for as long as she had known him. 

“I’ll need you. Down the line. I can’t have them hang this around your throat.”

He stood up a little straighter, his tone was short and clipped. “No, we couldn’t have that.”

“Everything we have ever done was borne from necessity,” she said. She stressed it. The truth was: she begged. 

She watched; it was as if the veil had fallen from his eyes. He looked at her cold and hard. He looked at her like she was anybody else. She didn’t allow herself to imagine what her own face might have looked like; if she had mirrored him, that same look of surprised betrayal. 

“This is where we are then, telling each other lies.” It was the last thing he said to her. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He had been beaten badly. He had been captured in East Berlin. They found him in West and even in his subsequent debriefings it never was made clear how exactly he managed to escape from a windowless warehouse, how he had the strength to kill that many men, how he got across the Wall. 

“You’re a magician, aren’t you,” she had teased. She said it with affection she believed he had earned. It was 1964 and the Wall was still new and they were still children – unformed, not-quite adult, hungry to prove themselves, even if only to each other. “No,” she said then, quietly. He was seated on the edge of the tub in a grimy bathroom, a safe house in Munich. “You knew you had to return to me.”

He didn’t say anything and he did not look at her. The eye closest to her was swollen shut, his cheekbone bruised and an angry storm cloud purple. 

She dragged a hand through his hair and his eyes fluttered closed. She leaned in. “I could give you a new name,” she said against his ear. He inclined his head towards her, and she thought: he belongs to me already. She thought he had earned this. 

“I don’t need a name,” he said to her. A smart and malleable boy. He raised his eyes to her. Someone should warn him and he was warning her. _It’s a fearful thing to fall into the hands –_

His cracked lip bled. She wiped it away with the pad of her thumb.

 

 

 

 


End file.
